Posts Tagged ‘CRFB’

The following information comes from a report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). The CRFB is hardly a liberal organization and is mostly considered a ‘centrist’ one that warns of impending doom if America doesn’t get it’s fiscal house in order–more along the Simpson Bowles channel in other words. We disagree entirely, of course, because the ‘centrist’ theme takes aim at all the social programs installed beginning with social security during the Great Depression 80 years ago. Our real problem is the crony capitalism we’ve developed the past 40 years where the wealthy are given all the tax breaks because of their money influence on Congress. The result has been increasing deficits and debt due to lack of government funding. It’s not a coincidence that the only administration to produce surpluses was a Democrat one, that of President Bill Clinton.

Gingrich’s tax and spending policies would add $7 trillion to the debt over the intermediate term. Romney’s policies would add $250 billion. Santorum’s policies would add $4.5 trillion. Only Ron Paul, who would essentially entirely do away with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration–in short all discretionary spending other than that for defense, which he would also cut drastically by simply installing a non-involvement policy with the rest of the globe–actually cuts the debt by $2.2 trillion.

There are some interesting figures in the article. One is that eliminating the health care reform law adds $80 billion to the debt. Like most policy organizations, CRFB realizes health care needs structural reform in that the system needs to move away from a fee based business model to a health outcomes model. All the GOP candidates ignore this truth and just shift the cost to families while doing nothing to control cost inflation created by the fee based model.

The big negatives for reducing debt in all the proposals comes from giving more tax cuts to businesses and the wealthy.

The take away? The GOP is not now nor has it ever been interested in reducing deficits or debt. The current crop (except for Ron Paul who’s policies would never be enacted for good reason) are all dissimulators, manipulators of data who know the mass media will never get around to actually studying the proposals so the public will be kept ignorant of the truth, if not completely mis-informed.

Beezer here. From crony capitalism to journalistic malfeasance the country’s economic health is being systematically dismembered. It’s a sad sight to witness. Our only hope is that somehow the public will see through the circus and demand fairness in the tax system, and a restoration of social welfare as one of the nation’s top priorities. Once again hat tip to economist’s view which linked to a Baseline Scenario article, which in turn linked to the CFRB research.